I opened the one from 1995 first, and I stood there in that Arizona heat unable to move, because it was full of me.
Newspaper. Two inches of the Herald sports page from a Tuesday in May, cut out clean with a razor, with a box score in it and my name misspelled the way that paper always misspelled it. A program from a middle school band concert. A photocopy of a fourth-grade honor roll list. Three photographs taken from far enough back that you can tell nobody knew they were being taken.
Fourteen boxes. 1989 through 2003. One for every year from the year I was born until the year I turned fourteen and my mother moved us to Reno and the trail, as far as those boxes go, runs out.
The 1989 box had a hospital bracelet in it. The little beaded kind. Baby Boy, six pounds eleven ounces.
My mother told me he never once looked back. I believed her for thirty years and I want to be careful here, because she was not lying to me. She believed it. He made sure of it.
Here is what the boxes said, and then what a man at a meeting hall on Speedway Boulevard filled in.
Gerald was a drunk. Bad enough that in 1996 my mother told him through a lawyer that he could be in my life sober or not at all, and he took the not at all, and he took it because he had already tried the other one twice and shown up to a birthday party in a state I do not need to describe.
He got sober on the ninth of October, 2004.
That is the same year he rented that storage unit. Fifty-four dollars a month, paid every month for nineteen years, out of a life lived in a residence motel with a hot plate and one window.
He never came back. The man on Speedway — Ruben, who had known him seventeen years — told me they talked about it more than once. He said Gerald’s whole thing was that showing up sober after ten years would be a gift to himself and a bill for me. He said, “Your dad decided the kindest thing he could do was stay gone and keep the boxes.”
I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think he knew either.
In the last box, the 2003 one, on top of everything, there was a letter in an envelope with my name on it and a stamp on it. Never mailed. And clipped to it, a bronze coin with a Roman numeral on it — nineteen years — that he’d picked up eleven days before he died.
The letter runs two pages and I’m not printing most of it. The last line is this:
“If somebody is reading this it means I ran out of time to do it properly, so let it be a lousy letter instead of nothing. I stayed away on purpose. I have never once stayed away because I did not want you.”
I flew home with the bracelet, the coin, and the letter, and I paid a company to ship the fourteen boxes.
They’re in my garage. My daughter is eleven and she has been through the 1998 one about nine times because there’s a picture in it of me at her age with a terrible haircut.
She calls him Grandpa Gerald. She never met him. I have decided that’s allowed.